Astros 9, Royals 2: George Springer is figuring it out and the results are pretty damn impressive. The Astros’ rookie homered in his fourth straight game while going 4 for 4 with two doubles, three RBI, a walk, and five runs scored.

Orioles 7, Brewers 6: Jonathan Schoop hit two homers and Nick Hundley singled in the go-ahead run in the 10th. In other news, I totally missed that the Orioles had acquired Nick Hundley. In my defense I had a healthy amount of bourbon over Memorial Day weekend. If the trade happened before then it’s because I never read Gleeman’s posts. He knows what he did.

Marlins 3, Nationals 2: Giancarlo Stanton went 3 for 4 with a two-run homer and Nathan Eovaldi was solid. To the extent you subscribe to the idea that Memorial Day is the time when you no longer dismiss unexpected results with “it’s early, but . . .” know that it’s the day after Memorial Day and the Marlins are two games out of first place and two games over .500.

Pirates 5, Mets 3: The Mets bullpen blows a three-run lead in the eighth and ninth by surrendering five runs, three of which came courtesy of Gaby Sanchez hits, four of which were given up by Jose Valverde. Who, immediately after the game, became a former Met. ‘E’s not pinin’, ‘E’s passed on! This Met is no more! He has ceased to be! ‘E’s been released and gone to meet ‘is agent! ‘E’s a stiff! Bereft of a job. ‘Is pitching processes are now ‘istory! ‘E’s off the twig! ‘E’s shuffled off ‘is active roster, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ bullpen invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-MET!!

Red Sox 8, Braves 6: Clay Buchholz walked eight dudes and gave up six runs in three innings. And man, walking Braves hitters is not easy. His teammates bailed him out, though, with a David Ortiz three-run blast capping a five-run rally to tie things up in the fifth and six innings of shutout work from the Sox’ pen. With that, the Red Sox finally snap their ugly losing streak. Even with the ugly seeping into the first three innings of this one.

Athletics 10, Tigers 0: A five-homer day for the A’s, including a Derek Norris grand slam. All of which is rich given that before the game Bob Melvin told his players to “grind” and not try to hit homers. The lesson here: screw that noise. Homers are awesome. They’re literally the best thing you can do while batting. That’s not my opinion. That’s an inescapable fact of baseball’s rules and scoring system. More homers. Hit ‘em all the damn time!

Rangers 7, Twins 2: You write a team’s epitaph after it loses a couple of players for the year and then they go and win three straight and five of six. Remember: no one knows anything about anything in this friggin’ game. Even the fancy, self-proclaimed experts who write and talk about baseball for major media conglomerates. Especially the fancy, self-proclaimed experts who write and talk about baseball for major media conglomerates. We’re the worst.

Editor’s Note: Hardball Talk‘s partner FanDuel is hosting a one-day $18,000 Fantasy Baseball league for Tuesday night’s MLB games. It’s just $2 to join and first prize is $2,000. Starts at 7:05pm ET on Tuesday. Here’s the FanDuel link.

Cubs 8, Giants 4: Jeff Samardzija finally got his first win of the season following a ten-strikeout performance. This sorta bums me out. I mean, on the one hand it’s great that he finally got a modicum of run support after to many tough luck outings. On the other hand I was really looking forward to a zero-win pitcher starting the All-Star game.

Phillies 9, Rockies 0: Ryan Howard was 3 for 4 and drove in five. Here come the Philly fan readers who have gone silent for the past two years to argue about the guy’s contract not being so bad. They’ll retreat to the darkness again in a couple of days.

Diamondbacks 7, Padres 5: A.J. Pollock hit a two-out, two-run homer in the ninth for the walkoff win. And we finally have a definitive answer to who is being walked off when this sort of thing happens. Here’s Kirk Gibson after the game:

“We were standing there and we were saying `Let’s walk them off, let’s walk them off,” Diamondbacks manager Kirk Gibson said, “and he crushed the ball.”

Given that he hit perhaps the most definitive walkoff homer in history, I think Gibson gets to have the final word.

Dodgers 4, Reds 3: Hyun-Jin Ryu was perfect over the first seven innings before Todd Frazier led off the eighth with a double. So much for that. And so much for the shutout and stuff as the Reds scored three that innings. All three runs were charged to Ryu, but two of them scored thanks to Brian Wilson not being able to put out the fire all that effectively. But that’s all the Reds could do and the Dodgers held on for the win.

Yankees 6, Cardinals 4: Brett Gardner had a leaping grab in the 11th to deprive Yadier Molina of either a homer or extra bases and then Brian Roberts came up big in the 12th with a bases-loaded single. I may be mangling this stat — I saw it on Twitter yesterday and can’t find it this morning — but I think this was only the 35th all-time game between the Yankees and the Cardinals, including World Series games. Which on the one hand is kind of understandable given that interleague hasn’t been around that long and for the bulk of it interleague was about divisional matchups, thus the two were not often pit against one another. On the other hand, the mental imagine I have of baseball history has the Yankees and Cardinals defining much of mid-century baseball history. Though I know better when I actually go year-by-year and think of who played in the World Series, I think of Yankees-Cardinals matchups as happening almost as much as Yankees-Dodgers matchups. Oh well.

For the record, the Yankees and the Cardinals played each other in the post-season in 1926, 1928, 1942, 1943, and 1964. They should’ve done that in 2004, as well, but let’s not talk about that. Prior to this, they had played two interleague series against each other: one in the Bronx in 2003 (Roger Clemens’ 300th win came in the opener) and one in St. Louis in 2005.

And I was a little taken aback when you said Monday is “usually an ATH day”. EVERY day is an “And That Happened” day now!

Craig will take any hook – lures, live bait, clams, frogs, worms….you name it….

umrguy42 - May 27, 2014 at 9:08 AM

As a Cards fan (who’s living in fairly solid Yankees country here in upstate NY, with the #2 being the Red Sox), I have to point out that the Cards are 3-2 in those World Series. And while I also don’t like to speak of 2004, I really liked their chances against the Yanks that year, too. :p

The Iron Giant leads MLB in 400-foot-plus moonshots. Yesterday’s blast was merely suborbital by the Giant’s standards, though – certainly, compared to that monster he bounced orf the glass wall behind the Budweiser bar in Macondo last weekend. I’m surprised Richard Branson hasn’t signed him to do advance publicity for Space Ship I trips yet. (Yeah, and if I were working for Saatchi and Saatchi Branson would have paid me millions for that suggestion, too.)

Good job by Nate Eovaldi; 6.1 innings, 2 ER both coming on a jack by the Palmetto Bug. So far, the rotation is stepping up to fill the crater left by El Keed, but, um, ah…it’s still early and the Feesh have two more games this week in Washington, where they usually do pretty poorly – except for the Iron Giant, whose stats in Gnats Stadium look like a microcosm of his season in general so far. Whereas including yesterday the Feesh are 2-12 overall since last season playing in our center of political malfunction, the Giant has 14 gophers there since he came up, which, I remind you, ain’t been all that long.

Just counting on my fingers, it looks to me like at his present pace the Iron Giant projects to batting around .315 with between 45-50 dingers, 160 RBIs and slugging up in the 700s. Somewhere out there an impartial arbitrator is drooling at prospects unfolding before him, and Scrooge McLoria is studying the minor league rosters for a bucket of EYPs he can get for the big guy before he ever reaches the table with a proposal in his hand.

PS – the above has nothing to do with dead parrots. It’s just how this oddball WordPiss program set me up. But as long as you mentioned parrots, yeah, we have flocks of feral parrots here in Macondo. The urban legend has it that they were liberated from the flight cages at MacroZoo by Hurricane Andrew, but in fact that storm killed most of those birds. Hollow bones and feathers don’t stand up well to 180-mph winds, you know? The ones who keep raiding my papayas, bananas and nisperos are ackcherley the descendants of escaped pets and/or released livestock from failing pet shops and animal importers – much like the basilisks, coneheads, iguanas, monitor lizards. pythons and anoles who currently populate our yards. Then again, children are horrible and it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that the fire ant infestations we have down here are also the result of some little brat dumping his ant farm in the backyard bushes.(Remember ant farms?)

But yes, dead parrots. In Australia – where I am headed in a couple of months on what I like to describe as a working holiday, you know, the way Craig describes trips to the Derby or the owner’s meetings as “working” holidays (doubtless after watching Jerry Lewis in Hardly Working with Mookie) – the farmers slaughter little gallahs, or rose breasted cockatoos, by the thousands because they’re crop pests. I mean, brutally. Meteorologists are crop pests too, but we don’t subject them to much worse than sustained derision (except for my beloved Stephanie Abrams, who could walk on my sunburned back in spiked heels and I would beg for more). So if you really want to see psitticines who have been shuffled unceremoniously orf this mortal coil with extreme prejudice, watching John Cleese smack a fake bird against a pet shop counter is small stuff. You want to go to Oz to see the real thing.

Yep. I head out on July 18, getting into Sydney…well…whatever day it is after flying for twenty damned hours with all the attendant malingering at LAX (which is probably short for “laxative” and since Burrito King has now closed all of its locations there would be no point in leaving the airport to head into town), spinal complications and sleight-of-head time zone changes. I head home on July 25. I expect to spend most of my time in Sydney but might take a quick trip to Melbourne to visit some of my wife’s relatives for a day and murder my blood glucose levels at one of the Italian pastry cafes on Lygon Street.

I’ve been to Oz several times and have yet to figure out how not to have a good time there. I keep it simple and stay out of the surf where the great whites, box jellies and salties can’t get to me. Beyond that, it’s a cinch.

Damn – I ackcherley called ‘em. Burrito King was only closed for vacation when a friend of mine went there while on vacation in LA a few months ago and sadly reported they had shut down. Happy happy joy joy! Years back my friend Al, who was the road manager for the Jan and Dean nostalgia tour (yes, really) used to send me a FEDEX tube full of Burrito King stuff whenever he was in LA, and I would send the same back east to him when I was out there and he was marooned on the sunrise side. Once one of his tubes showed up opened and resealed with a note of apology that it had been opened by the police because the drug dogs had been sniffing at it. Well, they obviously haven’t stemmed the flow of narcotics into the country but I bet you that no illicit burritos have made it in.

Incidentally, Al swore that there was a machaca in the tube. There wasn’t one there when we finally received it.

Old Gator - May 27, 2014 at 10:27 AM

PS – I also make a point of checking beneath the dunny seat for redbacks. It helps.

Too much bandwagoners in todays Braves and Redsox game, really hard to tell if they’re playin at home durin that time. A 5 run outburst in the 5th certainly got the Sox rollin there.

Awesome pitching effort also by “Monster” Ryu’s 7 perfect innings, not surprising Mr. Beard had loss control in the 8th. Truly the most discussed topic in South Korea this is.

“‘E’s not pinin’, ‘E’s passed on! This Met is no more! He has ceased to be! ‘E’s been released and gone to meet ‘is agent! ‘E’s a stiff! Bereft of a job. ‘Is pitching processes are now ‘istory! ‘E’s off the twig! ‘E’s shuffled off ‘is active roster, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ bullpen invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-MET!!”

Congratulations to the Red Sox; however they are not out of the woods yet. Their bullpen is gassed. They had to use 6 relief pitchers yesterday. Unless they get a chance to give their relief pitchers a rest, they will probably continue to struggle. By contrast, the Rays handled a tired pen a little bit differently. They called up Colome as an 8th bullpen arm and had him pitch 4 innings. After the game, he was returned to the minors.

The Jays did not win yesterday because of Encarnacion’s home run. The game was well in hand when he homered. The back to back homers by Navarro and Tolleson were much more important. The Jays did win because Erik Bedard remembered that he was Erik Bedard and gave up 8 runs in 4+ innings.

And my guess is that when the media tried to ask Beddard about it after the game he got all d-baggy with them. Because that is just who he is. A d-bag. And a jerk. I loathe him in case you did not fully grasp what I was driving at there. 1st hand experience meeting him and every account I’ve ever heard of him from media members and fans alike has him pegged as one of the biggest a-holes in the game. So despite seeing a divisional rival in the Jays rack up another W, I was happy to Beddard lose. AGAIN. Jerk.

It sure didn’t seem like a 4 run lead meant the “game was well in hand” for the Jays last night. After all 2-run and 3-run leads had already disappeared and Loup and Redmond both allowed a pair of base runners. Redmond in particular needed Molina to strike out swinging at some iffy pitches and a spectacular catch from Pillar in right to end his rather shaky inning.

Oh, it was pretty much what I expected. Bedard has had a very favorable HR/FB ratio (4.8%), GB/FB ratio is 0.77. Bombs away. FB tend to not stay within the confines of Rogers Centre, especially when the likes of Encarnacion and Bautista are wielding the bats.

Being a Tiger fan and a Michigan State grad, I’m as big a Kirk Gibson fan as anyone. While his HR for the Dodgers is iconic, the highest I can rank it is 3rd behind Carter & Maseroski since those were WS clinching walk offs.

Wilson Ramos tapped one back to the pitcher yesterday and made it about 50′ down the first base line before turning for the dugout. He was not benched by his manager. I wonder if anyone asked Williams about that.

Very nice extra innings win for the Yankees. Special note of appreciation goes to Gardner for possibly saving the game in extra innings with a nice catch and to the Yankees bullpen for their work after the starter Whitley left the game.

Not mentioned in the O’s breakdown was that the O’s tied the game up with 2 runs in the bottom of the 9th with 2 outs- Schoop HR, Delmon Young single (pinch run by Lough) and a Markakis double. And again 2 out double by Hardy in the 10th followed by a Hundley single.

Although Hundley did almost give up the game in the bottom of the 9th with a terrible overthrown to first on a bunt… but totally redeemed himself.

Visiting family out of town I didn’t get to watch any baseball this weekend, but I did get to watch the second greatest sport ever invented, Indiana driveway basketball.

Afterwards the 4′ 5″ shooting guard deigned to put on and use the Ted Williams glove to play catch with me, which his dad first put on almost a quarter century ago, and which I first put on more than half a century ago, and which has held up well because my dad rubbed it down with some bear grease stuff before he gave it to me.

Twas a good weekend to not witness the Twins efforts, and on an even brighter note the A’s seem to have fattened themselves on Kitty stew.

Indeed, if he does it again he’ll be hitting over 200. It’s apparently been communicated to him that if he fails in his current opportunity to establish himself in the majors that this might not be his last opportunity, but it’s by far his best one.

Ryan Howard was 3 for 4 and drove in five. Here come the Philly fan readers who have gone silent for the past two years to argue about the guy’s contract not being so bad.

What are you talking about? That thing is beyond repair now what with two lost seasons and the only direction being down. He’ll probably still produce 30 homers and probably 100 RBI a year which is all that Ruben cares about.

Amazing pitchers duel in Los Angeles. Justin Turner got the win with two diving stops at third filling in for Uribe, and wearing down Cueto with a 16 pitch walk in the 7th which started the rally which ultimately finished Cueto. The Reds got the loss through errors that cost them three ER. It was really 8 1/3, 1 ER for Ryu, as Wilson was not getting the outside part of the plate and gave up a pair. He had to be bailed out by Jansen, who struck out Phillips with the bases loaded. Jansen made it interesting again by striking out Mesoraco with runners on first and second to squeak out the 4-3 win. Wilson then went to eke out his living as a pitcher by juggling.

Still don’t understand by Craig brings up the Phillies fans saying the Howard contract isn’t bad. I don’t know ONE that thinks it isn’t. And Howard gets more than his fair share of criticism in Philly. Way more

They don’t think that NOW, but when the contract was signed many did. Here’s just one of the many posts HBT did about the contract. Scroll left and right to see the other articles. There’s a few Phillies Phans like J5 who were against it from the beginning, but not many were at the time.

After getting swept by the Jays, yesterday’s 5 HR performance by the A’s was welcome. With the warmer weather the ball carries better, and while Milone was able to keep the ball down Drew Smyly was not. The A’s usually have problems with lefties but yesterday was an indication that the right-handed batting platoon, and Moss, are figuring it out.

Today’s matchup of His Heterochromiousness, or whatever Historio calls Scherzer, and Sonny Gray is must-watch.

Google “heterochromia”, Seven. You must have Google on a favourites bar for reading Gator’s posts.

Old Gator - May 27, 2014 at 1:52 PM

Yeah, and when you do, make sure you distinguish “iridum” from “iridium.” One is how we spot celebrity pitchers trying to have a quiet cup of bean juice at the local Starbuck’s. The other is how we distinguish the age of dinosaurs from the age of obnoxious little mammals.